Friday, October 26. 2012

In 1774 the First Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia. In 1825 the Erie Canal opened in upstate New York, connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River. In 1881 the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" took place in Tombstone, AZ, as Wyatt Earp, his two brothers, and "Doc" Holliday confronted Ike Clanton's gang. Three members of Clanton's gang were killed; Earp's brothers were wounded. In 1905 Norway gained independence from Sweden. In 1951 Winston Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain for the second time. In 1958 Pan American Airways flew its first Boeing 707 jetliner from New York to Paris in eight hours and 41 minutes. In 1967 the Shah of Iran crowned himself and his queen after 26 years on the Peacock Throne. In 1972 national security adviser Henry Kissinger declared, "Peace is at hand" in Vietnam. In 1975 Anwar Sadat became the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the US. In 1977 the experimental space shuttle Enterprise glided to a bumpy but successful landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 1979 South Korean President Park Chung-hee was shot to death by Kim Jae-kyu, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. In 1994 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Prime Minister Abdel Salam Majali of Jordan signed a peace treaty during a ceremony at the Israeli-Jordanian border attended by President Clinton. In 1995 the US House passed, 227-203, a Republican balanced-budget bill aimed at shrinking the federal government, cutting taxes and returning power to the states. In 2004 the final vote count in the Afghan presidential election gave a sounding victory to interim leader Hamid Karzai.